Toy houses have always been a source of fascination and interest for children. Toy houses have been designed and made with many different shapes, sizes and colors. Doll houses are a common type of toy houses. Multipurpose toy houses are an added source of interest for both children and parents. These houses are usually designed and either painted and assembled by the manufacturer or come as kits ready to be assembled and painted. Toy house kits offer some freedom for the child to choose paint colors, but the object is to assemble, then paint the house and continually use with one fixed design. These houses are usually made of wood or pre-colored plastic and no method exists whereby a child can easily change colors or include his or her own figurative drawings of a house.
Similarly, many drawing books exist with interesting figures of houses for a child to color-in, but no method is readily available for a child to conveniently display them through the sides of a toy house's inside surfaces and easily conform to the three dimensionality of a toy house.
The purpose of the present invention is to provide a transparent toy house that could be used for general play similar to a doll house and include a method of conveniently holding drawing paper along the house's inside surfaces, whereby a child has a means to display drawings that could be made in the conventional manner as in a coloring book.
The method of holding paper inside and along plastic surfaces is of course not new. There are a variety of methods for holding pictures and drawings available. Transparent plastic picture frames make use of paper guides. Another method is preformed cardboard made to fit a plastic open face cubical or even cubical or even poly-faced transparent plastic structures used for holding and displaying pictures or drawings. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,738,039 issued Aug. 12, 1986 to Sun et al. discloses a detachable polygonal picture frame, U.S. Pat. No. 3,787,992 issued July 24, 1972 to Leonhardt discloses a depth dimensional picture frame. In addition multiframe structure have been disclosed by Rubin et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 4,553,344 and Rosenberg U.S. Pat. No. 4,070,780. Furthermore, Livingston et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 4,738,038 discloses an open ended advertising display card apparatus and container with a receptacle for holding items such as packets of salt and pepper.
However, to the best of the applicant's knowledge, there have been no multipurpose toy house inventions made explicitly for the display of a child's drawings of house type images that could easily be displayed through a toy house's surfaces and also the toy house in the conventional playful manner as in doll house use.